Issue 7
ISSUE
STORY TYPE
AUTHOR
13
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
November 4, 2024
How a Storied Printmaker Advances the Practice of Architecture
by Diana Budds
12
PEOPLE
October 21, 2024
Sounding Out a Better Way to Build
by Jesse Dorris
12
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
October 7, 2024
What It Means—and What It’s Worth—to Be “Light”
by Julie Lasky
12
PERSPECTIVE
September 23, 2024
Redefining “Iconic” Architecture and Ideals
by Sophie Lovell
12
PERSPECTIVE
September 9, 2024
Surrendering to What Is
by Marianne Krogh
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
August 26, 2024
Sometimes, Democratic Design Doesn’t “Look” Like Anything
by Zach Mortice
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
August 19, 2024
What Does Your Home Say About You?
by Shane Reiner-Roth
11
BOOK REVIEW
August 12, 2024
Is Building Better Cities a Dream Within Reach?
by Michael Webb
11
PEOPLE
August 5, 2024
The Value of Unbuilt Buildings
by George Kafka
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
July 29, 2024
Future-Proofing a Home Where Water Is a Focus and a Thread
by Alexandra Lange
11
BOOK REVIEW
July 22, 2024
Modernist Town, U.S.A.
by Ian Volner
11
PEOPLE
July 15, 2024
Buildings That Grow from a Place
by Anthony Paletta
10
URBANISM
June 24, 2024
What We Lose When a Historic Building Is Demolished
by Owen Hatherley
10
PERSPECTIVE
June 17, 2024
We Need More Than Fewer, Better Things
by Deb Chachra
10
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
June 3, 2024
An Ode to Garages
by Charlie Weak
10
PERSPECTIVE
May 28, 2024
In Search of Domestic Kintsugi
by Edwin Heathcote
10
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
May 13, 2024
The Perils of the Landscapes We Make
by Karrie Jacobs
10
PERSPECTIVE
May 6, 2024
Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence
by Jarrett Fuller
9
PERSPECTIVE
April 29, 2024
Why Can’t I Just Go Home?
by Eva Hagberg
9
PEOPLE
April 22, 2024
Why Did Our Homes Stop Evolving?
by George Kafka
9
ROUNDTABLE
April 8, 2024
Spaces Where the Body Is a Vital Force
by Tiffany Jow
9
BOOK REVIEW
April 1, 2024
Tracing the Agency of Women as Users and Experts of Architecture
by Mimi Zeiger
9
PERSPECTIVE
March 25, 2024
Are You Sitting in a Non-Place?
by Mzwakhe Ndlovu
9
ROUNDTABLE
March 11, 2024
At Home, Connecting in Place
by Marianela D’Aprile
9
PEOPLE
March 4, 2024
VALIE EXPORT’s Tactical Urbanism
by Alissa Walker
8
PERSPECTIVE
February 26, 2024
What the “Whole Earth Catalog” Taught Me About Building Utopias
by Anjulie Rao
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
February 19, 2024
How a Run-Down District in London Became a Model for Neighborhood Revitalization
by Ellen Peirson
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
February 12, 2024
In Brooklyn, Housing That Defies the Status Quo
by Gideon Fink Shapiro
8
PERSPECTIVE
February 5, 2024
That “Net-Zero” Home Is Probably Living a Lie
by Fred A. Bernstein
8
PERSPECTIVE
January 22, 2024
The Virtue of Corporate Architecture Firms
by Kate Wagner
8
PERSPECTIVE
January 16, 2024
How Infrastructure Shapes Us
by Deb Chachra
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
January 8, 2024
The Defiance of Desire Lines
by Jim Stephenson
7
PEOPLE
December 18, 2023
This House Is Related to You and to Your Nonhuman Relatives
by Sebastián López Cardozo
7
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
December 11, 2023
What’s the Point of the Plus Pool?
by Ian Volner
7
BOOK REVIEW
December 4, 2023
The Extraordinary Link Between Aerobics and Architecture
by Jarrett Fuller
7
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
November 27, 2023
Architecture That Promotes Healing and Fortifies Us for Action
by Kathryn O’Rourke
7
PEOPLE
November 6, 2023
How to Design for Experience
by Diana Budds
7
PEOPLE
October 30, 2023
The Meaty Objects at Marta
by Jonathan Griffin
6
OBJECTS
October 23, 2023
How Oliver Grabes Led Braun Back to Its Roots
by Marianela D’Aprile
6
URBANISM
October 16, 2023
Can Adaptive Reuse Fuel Equitable Revitalization?
by Clayton Page Aldern
6
PERSPECTIVE
October 9, 2023
What’s the Point of a Tiny Home?
by Mimi Zeiger
6
OBJECTS
October 2, 2023
A Book Where Torn-Paper Blobs Convey Big Ideas
by Julie Lasky
6
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
September 24, 2023
The Architecture of Doing Nothing
by Edwin Heathcote
6
BOOK REVIEW
September 18, 2023
What the “Liebes Look” Says About Dorothy Liebes
by Debika Ray
6
PEOPLE
September 11, 2023
Roy McMakin’s Overpowering Simplicity
by Eva Hagberg
6
OBJECTS
September 5, 2023
Minimalism’s Specific Objecthood, Interpreted by Designers of Today
by Glenn Adamson
5
ROUNDTABLE
August 28, 2023
How Joan Jonas and Eiko Otake Navigate Transition
by Siobhan Burke
5
OBJECTS
August 21, 2023
The Future-Proofing Work of Design-Brand Archivists
by Adrian Madlener
5
URBANISM
August 14, 2023
Can a Church Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis?
by Alex Bozikovic
5
PEOPLE
August 7, 2023
In Search of Healing, Helen Cammock Confronts the Past
by Jesse Dorris
5
URBANISM
July 31, 2023
What Dead Malls, Office Parks, and Big-Box Stores Can Do for Housing
by Ian Volner
5
PERSPECTIVE
July 24, 2023
A Righteous Way to Solve “Wicked” Problems
by Susan Yelavich
5
OBJECTS
July 17, 2023
Making a Mess, with a Higher Purpose
by Andrew Russeth
5
ROUNDTABLE
July 10, 2023
How to Emerge from a Starchitect’s Shadow
by Cynthia Rosenfeld
4
PEOPLE
June 26, 2023
There Is No One-Size-Fits-All in Architecture
by Marianela D’Aprile
4
PEOPLE
June 19, 2023
How Time Shapes Amin Taha’s Unconventionally Handsome Buildings
by George Kafka
4
PEOPLE
June 12, 2023
Seeing and Being Seen in JEB’s Radical Archive of Lesbian Photography
by Svetlana Kitto
4
PERSPECTIVE
June 5, 2023
In Built Environments, Planting Where It Matters Most
by Karrie Jacobs
3
PERSPECTIVE
May 30, 2023
On the Home Front, a Latine Aesthetic’s Ordinary Exuberance
by Anjulie Rao
3
PERSPECTIVE
May 21, 2023
For a Selfie (and Enlightenment), Make a Pilgrimage to Bridge No. 3
by Alexandra Lange
3
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
May 8, 2023
The Building Materials of the Future Might Be Growing in Your Backyard
by Marianna Janowicz
3
BOOK REVIEW
May 1, 2023
Moving Beyond the “Fetishisation of the Forest”
by Edwin Heathcote
2
ROUNDTABLE
April 24, 2023
Is Craft Still Synonymous with the Hand?
by Tiffany Jow
2
PEOPLE
April 17, 2023
A Historian Debunks Myths About Lacemaking, On LaceTok and IRL
by Julie Lasky
2
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
April 10, 2023
How AI Helps Architects Design, and Refine, Their Buildings
by Ian Volner
2
PEOPLE
April 3, 2023
Merging Computer and Loom, a Septuagenarian Artist Weaves Her View of the World
by Francesca Perry
1
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
March 27, 2023
Words That Impede Architecture, According to Reinier de Graaf
by Osman Can Yerebakan
1
PEOPLE
March 20, 2023
Painting With Plaster, Monica Curiel Finds a Release
by Andrew Russeth
1
PERSPECTIVE
March 13, 2023
Rules and Roles in Life, Love, and Architecture
by Eva Hagberg
1
Roundtable
March 6, 2023
A Design Movement That Pushes Beyond Architecture’s Limitations
by Tiffany Jow
0
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
February 7, 2023
To Improve the Future of Public Housing, This Architecture Firm Looks to the Past
by Ian Volner
0
OBJECTS
February 7, 2023
The Radical Potential of “Prime Objects”
by Glenn Adamson
0
PEOPLE
February 20, 2023
Xiyadie’s Queer Cosmos
by Xin Wang
0
PEOPLE
February 13, 2023
How Michael J. Love’s Subversive Tap Dancing Steps Forward
by Jesse Dorris
0
SHOW AND TELL
February 7, 2023
Finding Healing and Transformation Through Good Black Art
by Folasade Ologundudu
0
BOOK REVIEW
February 13, 2023
How Stephen Burks “Future-Proofs” Craft
by Francesca Perry
0
ROUNDTABLE
February 27, 2023
Making Use of End Users’ Indispensable Wisdom
by Tiffany Jow
0
PEOPLE
February 7, 2023
The New Lessons Architect Steven Harris Learns from Driving Old Porsches
by Jonathan Schultz
0
PERSPECTIVE
February 7, 2023
The Day Architecture Stopped
by Kate Wagner
0
OBJECTS
February 7, 2023
The Overlooked Potential of Everyday Objects
by Adrian Madlener
0
ROUNDTABLE
February 7, 2023
A Conversation About Generalists, Velocity, and the Source of Innovation
by Tiffany Jow
0
OBJECTS
February 7, 2023
Using a Fungi-Infused Paste, Blast Studio Turns Trash Into Treasure
by Natalia Rachlin
Untapped is published by the design company Henrybuilt.
PEOPLE
09.11.2023
Roy McMakin’s Overpowering Simplicity

By deftly tweaking everyday objects, the artist and designer evokes the weight—and love—of the world.

small white chest with five drawers and one is taken out and sitting on top of the chest
Roy McMakin, “A small chest of drawers with one drawer that doesn’t fit” (2008). (Courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York)


In the summer of 2007, I got on a flight paid for by a magazine to travel from my home in Brooklyn, where I had recently torpedoed my life, to Seattle, where I would meet an artist, or maybe an architect or maybe a designer, named Roy McMakin. I hadn’t heard of Roy, which doesn’t mean much—I’d just started writing about architecture a few years earlier, and was mostly only aware of designers who had publicists, who were based in New York, and who took me to lunch. But I was excited to write about Roy. It was validating to be flown somewhere, and I felt optimistic that my career wasn’t over, even though, a few months earlier, I’d published a story in The New York Times that had required two corrections, which I thought—believed—made me unemployable, and also, unlovable.

Before flying it seems like I must have gone to the back room of the Chelsea gallery that was then representing McMakin (he wasn’t yet Roy, to me), and paged through books that had been handed to me, and seeing immaculately constructed chairs and tables, often bisected with paint, and dressers that I couldn’t understand but wanted to think about. McMakin, now 67, had done three shows for this gallery: one a “complete residential environment,” one named after his mother, Lequita Faye Melvin, and based on “memories of his grandparents’ house in Oklahoma,” and one that, to my mind, and maybe also to his, about the heartbreak and the beauty of trying to fit things together.

The latter was reflected in the exhibition “For,” in which McMakin, among other moves, combined found furniture with new sculpture, creating pieces made half of the past and half of the present, and it was everything to me, a person who had just realized that I had a past that was intruding onto what otherwise could have been my present. Though in writing this, I realize that “For,” in that moment, hadn’t yet happened. Not that the detail matters.

My practice then and now involves preparing as little as possible before interviewing someone. I always want to come fresh, and open, and maybe I saw those books after I first saw Roy in Seattle (my past with him, and how it all began, and how it is now—he is my friend, my favorite artist, my subject, my collaborator, my interlocutor, and my wise, slightly elder—is so mingled with the chaos of that time in my life). I didn’t realize basic biographical facts, such as the fact that he founded the handmade objects line Domestic Furniture in San Diego, in 1987, and officially opened it as a showroom the following year in Los Angeles, where he lived in Larchmont Village, where tonight my daughter and her father and some friends and I will go out to dinner. Or that he later started the firm Domestic Architecture, or that he had continued to produce fine art that looked like architecture, furniture that operated as art, and art that felt like a house. I didn’t realize that I would think about Roy’s work for—at this point—the rest of my life. Instead, given what was, as they say, going on for me, I thought, How little can I get away with?

I was supposed to write about a house designed for an art-collecting couple, whom I thought at first had hired Roy to design their house, a phrase that’s really doing the bare minimum here. What they did, or what I came to see, was that they had commissioned Roy to do a piece for them, and the piece happened to be—or had to be, or could only be—in the form of a house: a complete residential environment, overlooking Lake Washington.

During that trip, Roy picked me up from wherever I was staying and we drove to the house. At first it seemed sort of normal, a mix of Victorian and craftsman (not that I know anything about either of those styles—not my century). Inside, I realized there was something else going on.

I had been writing about nice houses for long enough by then that I had a routine, which is likewise followed by many design journalists: I would ask about what the clients wanted, and then about what ideas were embedded into their home, listening while feigning a sense of curiosity and delight. But here I was out of routine. I was curious. I was delighted. The house itself was both open and delineated; rooms at once swept into each other and separated themselves. There were tables angled together and plushly upholstered chairs that looked like things my Corvallis-based, then-alive grandmother would have had, but tweaked, somehow, into furniture that made you look twice if you looked hard enough the first time to detect something was just slightly unexpected.

small blue rocking chair without a seat, except a thin panel down the middle
Roy McMakin, “A Rocking Chair (that never had a seat) I Painted Blue When I Was Sixteen” (2011). (Courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York)


In the primary bedroom, two windows were right next to each other. One had small frames that opened, providing an obstructed view of the lake that offered the capacity for transformation, and one was embedded in a single large frame, and inoperable: no visual obstruction, but no fungibility. The wife had wanted one style and the husband another; Roy had found a way to both draw attention to these differences, and to soothe them. It all exemplified how everything in Roy’s world, it seemed, was ratcheted up to the nth degree of execution, and also, I would come to learn, of emotion.

That night, the owners took us out to dinner and maybe they invited me, or maybe I invited myself, but somehow I ended up sleeping in the guest wing that night, in the lower level of the house, in a room that was delineated with at least two paint colors that cut through the bed, ran through the bedside table, and made the entire room a work of art by drawing attention to things I had never thought about, like beds always being one color. As I went to sleep, I thought about the room as a work of art, the way in which the bedside table was two colors, and how that evoked inclusion and exclusion. The next day I flew back to New York. I wrote my piece, giving it my best instead of my least, and it was published and life went on.

I figured that I would never see Roy again because that was the nature of this kind of assignment. But that is not what happened. We kept in touch. It was probably Roy, whom I’ve learned is very good at keeping in touch. One of my favorite things about him is that when I send him a text message he responds with a phone call, usually within two minutes.

Roy came to my wedding. Later, I talked to him about my divorce. He did a book event with me in Berkeley, when I’d just started grad school and published my second book, about nature and architecture, in which I included that Seattle house. He moved to San Diego, where he built an extraordinary collection of works of art—a house, complete with his furniture, for himself and his husband, Mike; a complex of rentals. After a while, I figured out that he was no longer tied to Seattle. Sometimes I would ask him if he missed that city. Eventually he would graciously say, “Well, it’s been a long time,” which reminded me that a lot of time had passed, and that we were still in conversation.

I want to tell you about Roy’s work, but at the same time part of me wants to keep it to myself, which is fueled by my inherent selfishness, which isn’t the vibe. Roy is generous. His work is generous. And his capacity and imagination to distill the weird, stupid, awful, wonderful, extraordinary fact of being alive into three- and two-dimensional forms is astonishing.

I will tell you that in his house, right now, there is a room in which there are eight dressers, four for Mike and four for Roy, all slightly different. On one of the dressers—one of his—is a series of objects he has collected, silently resting there. They made me think about conversations we’ve had about his work and how little there often is to say, because there is just so much to feel.

For instance, in 2008 he made a piece called “Untitled (a small chest of drawers with one drawer that doesn’t fit).” It’s a maple dresser, with five drawers, and one of them doesn’t fit so it sits on top. The piece, to me, is wrenching. It reminds me of all the times I didn’t fit, and also all the times I assumed I didn’t fit but maybe actually did.

He made another piece, called “4 photographs of 4 sides of a green chest of drawers (cameras the same distance from each side) with Mike, and another green chest,” in 2011, which is a grouping of four photographs, two featuring himself and Mike, crouched together behind chests. To me, it’s about Mike’s love for Roy, and Roy’s love for Mike, and Roy’s desire for other people to get to feel the kind of love that he feels for Mike and Mike feels for him, and also the way in which dressers, for him, became love. The dressers are central to these photographs; Mike is central to these photographs; Roy is central to these photographs. That’s why I keep thinking about his work.

four framed photos focused on a green dresser, and in two of them one man is sitting curled up on top of another
Roy McMakin, “4 photographs of 4 sides of a green chest of drawers (cameras the same distance from each side) with Mike, and another green chest” (2011). (Courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York)


Another piece, “Untitled” (this one with no parenthetical subtitle), from 2018, and from the same Garth Greenan Gallery show as the photographs, is an enameled maple dresser, white, six drawers. At first blush, it’s plain, and I think maybe it’s about the craft of maple or the process of enameling. Then I realize that there are no pulls on the drawers, that I don’t know if they can open, and that it’s unlikely that they’re push drawers. And so the functional dresser becomes a sculpture and the object asks me to look at it differently, to consider volume and form and ridge and edge line. That is another trick of Roy’s heart: to invite us to glance, and then to look, and then to really, really look.

By now you have probably realized that dressers, and chests, are a large part of Roy’s work. When I asked him why that is he said that, when he was younger, he found solace in dressers. Furniture became an object onto which he could imprint his love: the love he came here with, the love we all show up with, the love that gets torn out of us or slowly leached out of us, the love that maybe we want, or at least, that I want.

When I asked him a few years later to talk about that again, because I felt like I was the opposite—I have lost so much physical material in my life; I have decided not to care—he talked about his work being more than a chance for him to imprint his own love. It’s a chance, he said, to give some of that love to someone else.

The way he sees it, or maybe it’s just the way I see it and have imprinted onto him, is that it isn’t only about the dresser he loved. It’s about how he loved that dresser and getting someone else to love a dresser, too. Or it’s about feeling loved by a dresser, by the fact of it having been made by someone. We are all alone and we are all loved.

Roy’s work is what they used to call “deceptively simple,” though there is nothing deceptive about it. Actually, it is so honest and so direct and so straightforward that it is almost too much to process, too hot to handle. To be honest, I thought about how simple I could make this story. Part of me thinks that I have not told you enough about Roy. But when I told him I was writing this and asked if he wanted to be involved, he said maybe for fact checks, sure, but that this was my thing, and that’s the thing. One of the things.

Roy performs very little on the surface and accomplishes multitudes beneath it. He talks about love, and collecting crap, and art, and how much he loves Mike—he loves Mike, so much—and within that simplicity and that clarity comes the oceanic feeling. When I talk to Roy, and when I think about his work, I am often overcome because there is so little to hold on to that I am overwhelmed. His work reminds me of all the pain that I have experienced and all of the love that I have been given next to that pain. It shows me that even in my solitude, I am not alone. That particularly in my loneliness, I am not alone.

I love Roy’s work and I love Roy. Sometimes people say they love someone when what they really mean is that they think they’re fine, or that they met them one time, or that they know they’re supposed to say that about them. But really, I love Roy. And maybe in many ways this whole essay is just an attempt, by barely glancing across the surface of what I could say, to show what this one love has looked like. How it has felt.